The words “queer” and “virtue” hardly ever appear together. Like alpha and omega, sin and grace, and wrong and right, they are always seen as opposing ends of a spectrum. Elizabeth Edman’s Queer Virtue: What LGBTQ People Know About Life and Love and How It Can Revitalize Christianity brilliantly, succinctly, and with enormous empathy and insight argues that these terms, far from being oppositional, are wedded in ways that make them distinctly unique. Indeed, brought together they are the quintessence of Christianity.
The last four decades, since the advent of Gay Liberation in 1969, have produced a wealth of literature dealing with the troubled, ever-evolving relationship between feminism, (homo)sexuality, and Christianity: Mary Daly’s revolutionary Beyond God the Father: Toward a Philosophy of Women’s Liberation (1973), John Boswell’s Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality: Gay People in Western Europe from the Beginning of the Christian Era to the Fourteenth Century (1980), Mark D. Jordan’s The Invention of Sodomy in Christian Theology (1997), and Patrick S. Cheng’s From Sin to Amazing Grace: Discovering the Queer Christ (2012) all gave us fresh ways to think about how historically and theologically the relationship between Christianity and queerness is far more complex than we had ever imagined. Queer Virtue builds on these works and takes them a step further—if modern Christianity is in a crisis, it can be saved, revitalized, by the contemporary queer experience and consciousness. Edman’s vision challenges and reawakens Christianity from the inside and forces believers and nonbelievers alike to rethink and reanimate their long held assumptions.
We live in a country in which the lived experience of being LGBTQ and the internal experience and practice of being Christian seem to continually clash: same-sex marriage debates, religious freedom exemptions, the implications of antigay sentiments, and the limits of hate crime laws are in the headlines every day. Queer Virtue addresses none of this directly—and yet, with theological and political perceptivity, Edman gives us new ways to think about all of these issues by demanding that we understand queerness not as compatible with Christianity, but an embodiment of it.
MICHAEL BRONSKI
Series Editor, Queer Action/Queer Ideas